Interview
with Eric Sandweiss: Here Eric discusses his study of the history, geography, and
public image of Delmar Boulevard, a street that more than any embodies St.
Louis’s long racial divide.

How did you choose your site? What intrigued
you about that particular place?

Delmar
is not a site, per se, but a way of defining a thousand possible sites--a
street that most St. Louisans, myself included, are accustomed to using as an
orientation device when they think about class, race, and geography in the
city. So I was intrigued by Delmar as a collection of many sites but also as a
unifying device in people’s minds and possibly in the historical record. Delmar
would have intrigued me, anyhow, because I lived most of my life in St. Louis
within a few blocks of either side of it. This gave the street a personal
significance and sense of familiarity that allowed me to juxtapose my own
memory and impressionistic sense of segregation in St. Louis with an
opportunity to pursue a broader historical perspective. The street lends itself
to bringing those two perspectives together.

What kinds of questions do you find yourself
asking about the site, and how are those questions shaping your exploration of
the place?

Some
of the questions that I faced in getting started simply related to
understanding the history of the street itself - its actual planning, its
eventual improvement, and then ultimately its unification from a number of
smaller but related roads (first Morgan Street, then Delmar, but also stretches
once known as Enright Avenue and Old Bonhomme Road) into a straight line
running from the Mississippi waterfront to Ladue.

A
second set of factual questions related to the presence, absence, or movement
of different groups along and on either side of this line, from the nineteenth
century to the present day. These questions led me to some basic research
sources, including tract-level census data, which were for social and
historical reasons often bound by Delmar on either their north or south side. So
among the initial questions that I pursued, and then presented at the symposium
this spring, were questions about the racial composition of neighborhoods on
either side of the street during those decades. This inquiry helped me to
get a better sense of the reality--or the misperception--of St. Louisans’ habit
of describing an African American side of town north of Delmar and a white side
on the south.

What challenges are you encountering with
site-based study?

It
is all challenging, but not unfamiliar to me or to anyone who studies urban
landscapes, which is what I did even before I called myself a historian.
Site-based study, in particular along Delmar, is in a way something I have done
since I was a kid wandering up and down the Loop. But in terms more particular
to this study, one challenge is simply familiarizing myself with the ways in
which the street and its adjoining neighborhoods have changed since I last
lived in St. Louis, fifteen years ago. Also challenging is understanding the
street’s many sites in a way that goes beyond my remembered understanding as a
resident with admittedly limited and biased perspective on the street. So being
able to picture Delmar as intimately through downtown, Midtown, and the
West End as I can in its more familiar stretches in University City is
important for me, as is learning how to study it from a historical as well as
an impressionistic standpoint.

What were your expectations about the project
and site, and what have you found that has surprised or even shocked you, and
forced you to revise those expectations?

I
have not had too many surprises, or been too shocked--not to date. What I
expected to find was a more nuanced version of the oversimplified common
conception held by many St. Louisans--both black and white--of Delmar as a
racial dividing line. Indeed, I have found both some of the fundamental truths
behind that preconception, and the complications that shake out that truth. I
have been able to see, at a more granular level, the decade-by-decade impact of
racial turnover, or, “tipping,” as it was long called in the real estate world.
I have seen at a block-by-block and decade-by-decade level the incredible power
of the vicious cycle of anticipated property-value decline as it creates its
own fulfillment. This was true as early as the passage of the 1916 segregation
ordinance, which directly implicated Delmar and its adjoining streets. It is
equally true of the changes in my own lifetime, as African-American families,
tenants, and home owners, forced out of demolished or declining housing, found
their way into new neighborhoods north of Delmar, while existing white
occupants moved out. Delmar is a good place to observe that dynamic taking
place in microcosm. One of the pleasant surprises of my recent research, on the
other hand, is the continued conversation of Delmar as a healing line. It is a
scar, but a scar that can heal. The discussion it gets by people who are
interested in St. Louis reviving, seeing it as a point of intersection between
white and black, seems to me a conversation well worth having. It surprises me
how actively it is taking place.

How has collaboration played a part in your
research process?

Collaboration
played a role primarily in the initial stages, while working with Heidi and
Iver and other members of the team as they shaped the MWMS project. This work
helped me to feel involved and to be influenced by their interests and
conversations. So this is a project I would not have thought to do but for the
kind of collaborative atmosphere that they and the whole team put together. I
pursued the early research stages on my own, but the chance to come to the
symposium and listen and learn from others has given me a new impetus to
collaborate and continue to learn from other contributors. I look forward to
that collaboration, as well as some kind of public collaboration, as it seems
to me that would be an essential part of the new paradigm tested with this
project – it really should be taken back out in the streets and engage with St.
Louisans about the world they experience. They are the contemporary experts who
can inform us as to the state of segregation in the city we live in today.

I
hope that the photographic and cartographic record of Delmar can help to bring
home some of the points that interest me about the street’s relationship to the
overall geography of St. Louis and to its development (or undevelopment) over
time. Juxtaposing photographs from different decades—such as the picture
showing affluent-looking white shoppers along Delmar and the image of
middle-class Black shoppers on the street some twenty years later, helps to make a
point about the city’s changing demographics. It would also be great if the
project could use moving images to illustrate the experience that strikes
visitors and St. Louisans alike when they drive on Delmar: the graphic change
in architecture and streetscape as one travels from the south to the north side
of the street. Newcomers to St. Louis might think to themselves, “Why
does crossing sixty feet of concrete lead to a different social experience? It
does not make sense.” A visual record could help to capture that paradox.

How do you see your research going beyond an
academic contribution?

I
have not designed something that would respond to that question yet, but I
certainly think, based on my years as a public historian (most of them in St.
Louis) that a project like this would seem incomplete if it did not include
interviews, discussions, public programs, or some other means of taking the
conversation beyond my particular research-based perspective and bringing it to
a wider group with a stake in the same questions--and potentially with the
ability to help me shift those questions to ones that are more interesting and
vital, to them and to me.

Read more about his site here. Learn
more about Eric Sandweiss by visiting the Contributors page. For
additional information about the MWMS project please go to our main page.